The annual Met Gala is in full swing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this year, fashion’s biggest night is all about “camp”—a niche, slippery “sensibility” that most people just pretend to understand.
The annual Met Gala is in full swing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this year, fashion’s biggest night is all about “camp”—a niche, slippery “sensibility” that most people just pretend to understand.
Camp, as one colleague put it, is “one of those things someone would start talking about at a dinner party and I would be like ‘uh huh, totally’ before desperately Googling it.” Indeed, numerous articles and explainers emerged ahead of the gala, their writers relishing the opportunity to explain camp to the masses. And yet, camp remains elusive—is it a way of dressing, a way of thinking, or a way of acting? Is it drag? Lamps? Louis XIV? Lady Gaga? Help!
According to Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” inspired the theme, camp is “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.” And according to the captions in the Met’s exhibition,“Camp: Notes on Fashion,” that sensibility encompasses everything from “decorativism” to “the trash aesthetic.” The captions feature quotes from prodigious designers and literary greats alike, and while they may not explain camp much better than the bloggers, they certainly have fun trying.
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